Remembering the "Mayor of the LES"

Great story today in The Wall Street Journal about Rudy Mancuso. On Oct. 3, 1951, at the Polo Grounds, Mancuso -- who had one exposure left on his camera -- took what is arguably the most famous photograph in the history of baseball: Giant Bobby Thomson taking an 0-1 fastball from Dodger Ralph Branca over the leftfield wall in the bottom of the ninth. And the Giants win the pennant!



Sadly, though, Mancuso never received credit for the photo. He even lost the negative. As Joshua Prager notes in the Journal, "And so, tragically, the man who shot 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World' was entirely forgotten."

Many years passed. Mancuso's pencil moustache turned from black to white as newswires and then vendors and then Web sites hocked an inexhaustible supply of his photo. He made no money from his shot and held no proof that it was he, an embosser and die cutter living in a Lower East Side walk-up, who'd most famously preserved baseball's greatest moment.

Anyway, you can read the story for yourself to see what became of the negative and to find out what he did at the Hotel Rivington. Mancuso died on May 10 at age 89.

The Times did a piece on photo in September 2006.